Abstract
The stichotrichous ciliates have attracted the attention of both biologists and computer scientists due to the unique genetic mechanism of gene descrambling. It has been suggested that it would perhaps be possible to co-opt this genetic process and use it to perform arbitrary computations in vivo. Motivated by this idea, we study here some basic properties and the computational power of a formalization inspired by the template-guided recombination model of gene descrambling proposed by Ehrenfeucht, Prescott and Rozenberg. We demonstrate that the computational power of a system based on template-guided recombination is quite limited. We then extend template-guided recombination systems with the addition of “deletion contexts” and show that such systems have strictly greater computational power than splicing systems [1, 2].
This research was funded in part by institutional grants of the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Western Ontario, the SHARCNET Research Chairs programme, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the National Science Foundation of the United States.
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Daley, M., McQuillan, I. (2006). On Computational Properties of Template-Guided DNA Recombination. In: Carbone, A., Pierce, N.A. (eds) DNA Computing. DNA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3892. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11753681_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11753681_3
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